Notes on Ukraine

The chorus that demands that Ukraine be defended, now taken up by a large part of the left in the “West,” apes the calls from Washington and the Obama administration, and is simply the mirror image of Russia’s demand that the interests of ethnic Russians in Ukraine warrants Putin’s intervention, beginning in the Crimea. For both positions, what is at issue is the defense of capitalism, and the imperialist and economic interests of capitalist states, which progressives in the West, in their rush to defend the new regime in Kiev, dress up in the language of democracy and nationalism, the twin ideologies which permit the left to defend capitalism. Putin is a Russian chauvinist, while the new regime in Kiev is backed by Svoboda, whose electoral success in the Western Ukraine, and whose role in the Maidan, has now made it a force in the new Ukrainian regime, with respect to which our progressives are prepared to overlook Svoboda’s calls for resistance to the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia,” and to Svoboda’s openly fascist politics. Meanwhile that same new regime in Kiev has named several of Ukraine ’s most powerful oligarchs to be the new governors of its Eastern provinces, even as it seeks vast loans from the EU and the IMF, which will then impose new and even greater draconian austerity on the collective worker of Ukraine . What began in Ukraine as a social struggle, a response to a deepening economic crisis, has fast become both an intra-capitalist conflict, and an inter-imperialist one as well.